RF12 skeleton sketch

The RF12 library has all the code to drive an RFM12B wireless module, and supports full interrupt-drive sending and receiving of arbitrary packets up to 66 bytes in length.

Interrupt drivers are fiendishly hard to debug and get 100% right, but often well worth the effort. The result is code which behaves almost as if it’s running in the background, i.e. it makes the ATmega appear to support multi-tasking, with all I/O happening all by itself.

In the case of the RFM12B, this is quite important, because there are some very strict timing requirements as to how and when to exchange data with the hardware. Once a driver is interrupt-driven, the rest of the code doesn’t have to be as strict – all critical timing requirements are dealt with, even if you don’t poll the driver regularly.

But the logic of all this stuff can be a bit overwhelming at first. So, to help out, and prompted by a recent discussion on the forum, I’ve set up an example of how to write a sketch which can read and send packets:

One crucial detail is that you can’t just send data whenever you feel like it – you have to throttle the outgoing sends a bit using sendTimer , and you have to ask the RF12 driver for permission to send using rf12_canSend(). Failure to do this will “mess up the air waves” and severely interfere with RF communication between any nodes, even those that play nice.

To write a sketch which only sends, leave consumeInData() empty – don’t throw out the first “if”, because those rf12_recvDone() calls are still essential.

To write a sketch which only receives, simply make produceOutData() return 0. Removing the last two if’s is also ok, in this case.

Once you have your sketch working, you can start adding tricks to reduce power consumption: turning the RFM12B on and off, running at lower clock speeds, putting the ATmega into a low-power sleep state, etc.

Great skeleton sketch, I’ve been meaning to put one of these together myself for ages, but always end up taking an existing sketch and chopping out the bits I want.

Have you thought about doing a series either in the wiki or weblog on playing with JeeNodes? From questions in the forum, I’ve noticed that you seem to be attracting a larger number of beginners to microcontrollers (which is great!) and a series like that would be wonderful for them and probably educate a few of the old hands in better ways to do things.